Unit 2: What is Tragedy?

When it comes to making decisions, there are many things affecting what people decide to do. Those factors that lead us to make the decisions we do have more of an effect on us than we would usually think.

​People usually tend to choose the option that seems more simple and what seems better. That is why when people advertise things, they do it a certain way. They advertise things in a way that will influence the decision making of the audience. Dan Ariely proves this in his TED Talk, "Are we in control of our own decisions?". He shows a website with three different options for purchasing subscriptions. There was the option for an Economist.com subscription for $59.00, a print subscription for $125.00, and an option for both of those for the price of $125.00. According to Dan Ariely, most people would choose the third option because it seemed like a better deal. No one wanted the middle option, since it seemed useless. When the middle option was eliminated, the first option suddenly became more popular than the combo deal. This is because the middle option was not there to make the combo deal seem better than it really was. So sometimes people can trick others into thinking something might be useful, when it is really not useful at all.

The scary thing about this, is that a lot of the time, people are manipulating us into making the decisions that we make. Most of the time we make our decisions, we are not really doing it ourselves. Others are putting an influence on us to make us choose to do what we do. It is definitely not always the case, but a lot of the time it is.